


the heart is a beast that'll keep you

by indigostohelit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Bad Weather, Ghosts, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Middle Ages, Past Violence, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 04:24:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20687474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit
Summary: James Barnes is an art history professor who has everything he could ask for: tenure, a newly discovered medieval manuscript to research, and the constant teasing of his best friend, whose office is right next to his. But when he unearths evidence that the manuscript's writer may have been in love with another man, James finds himself confronting a destructive ghost with a major interest in how he writes history.





	the heart is a beast that'll keep you

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very silly love letter to medieval studies which is also about internalized homophobia and trauma, and makes reference to past homophobic violence. Characters also reference a couple of artworks which I'll link in the endnote, if you want a visual aid. Non-art historical references will also be linked for kicks.
> 
> No offense is meant to any academic or institution in particular, or field of study in general, except J.R.R. Tolkien. No university remotely like Bucky's exists, and if it did, it wouldn't in America. Title from "Mausoleum" by Seryn.

The rain’s started again. James eyes the streaks, pinstriping the windows and puddling on the sill, and tucks his hands behind his back. “All right,” he says. “Who else can think of a reason Guinevere might be mirrored with Mardoc in this carving? Anyone? Yes—” The girl he points to is a plump junior with a shock of purple hair, who’s been absolutely crushing her participation grade. She has a terrible name, some really unfortunate Mildred or Agnes sort of—“Gertrude? What do you think?”

“Okay, well,” says the junior, “she and Mardoc are the only ones who aren’t in armor, right? Or holding weapons. So maybe the artist means to, you know, draw some kind of gender parallel between them. All of these knights surrounding them, with those big long lances—maybe Mardoc’s meant to be feminized.”

“Good,” says James, surprised. “That’s interesting. Though—avoid leaning on Freud, here—let’s remember he wouldn’t be born for another eight centuries. Sometimes a lance is just a lance. But good, really good. Anybody else?”

A long pause. Towards the back, a freshman is visibly texting under his seat. “If you’ll all look closely,” James says, pointedly, “and think back to the reading—which you all _did_, right?—who can remember what Geoffrey of Monmouth has to say about Guinevere and Modredus? What does she do in that story, while she’s separated from Arthur?”

“Infidelity!” says a big kid in an American flag hoodie, and claps a hand over his mouth.

James finger-guns at him. “Raise your hand—but yes. Guinevere and Mardoc, her kidnapper, are also mirrored in this arch because they’re both characterized as betrayers. She’s with him against her will, sure, but since she _is_ with him, her sexuality—her fidelity—her purity—access to her ‘tower’, if we do wanna get Freudian—is now at risk.” He holds up a hand to the purple-haired junior’s outraged face. “I know—I know! Maybe some twelfth-century Italian women were just as mad about it, hey? Research paper ideas, guys, keep a list! Now—”

“Okay,” says a voice from the back, “but, like, really?”

James raises his eyebrows. The speaker is the freshman who’d been texting under his desk earlier. “Raise your hand,” he says mildly. “Yes?”

The boy wiggles his fingers half-heartedly in the air. “I mean, like,” he says, “do you actually _know _any of this stuff?”

“Well,” says James, very patiently, “we know some things. We know which stories about King Arthur people in the area would have been reading, or more likely, listening to. We know that cathedrals in this area typically tried to convey the same religious ideas in different ways for commoners and for nobles.”

“But we don’t really _know_, right?” says the freshman. “Like, you’re basically saying all this because the two of them are carved next to each other. Maybe they’re just there for no reason. Maybe it’s just, like, a family portrait. A really ugly family portrait. It’s not like it _has _to mean anything.”

He sits back and crosses his arms over his chest. James breathes in, counts to five, and smiles at him. “You’re right,” he says. “It might not mean anything. But it might mean something—and opening ourselves to the possibility that artists have perspectives, that they have thoughts, that human beings in the past had just as much capacity for complex emotion and nuance and self-expression as human beings in the present—even if we, from our position, happen to find their self-expression _ugly—_lets us create meaning in our own lives. It allows us to look at every piece of communication with a little more thoughtfulness. It allows us to work at empathy.”

“But, like, maybe you’re overthinking all this for no reason,” says the freshman. “I mean. No offense, but.”

“Yes, Eugene,” says James. “Maybe we are. On the other hand, based on the very small chance that all the work of my colleagues over the past few centuries _isn’t _total bullshit, you’ll still have a quiz on Friday—so if you’d all like to come up to the front for your study guides...”

The junior with the purple hair is the last to collect her study guide, lingering at the back until the rest of the class has slithered out through the doors by the lectern. “Thanks for the speech,” she says, a little shyly.

“Thanks.” says James, “I give it every year.” At the look on her face, he has to laugh a little. “You’re in the major, yeah?”

“Medieval Studies and Gender & Sexuality,” she says, sounding practiced. “Honors for Gender.”

“Ah,” he says, grinning, “one of Romanov’s? Grad school plans?” She nods. “Do you mind if I give you some advice?” She nods again, and he says, “You’re going to start teaching students soon—if Natasha hasn't roped you into doing it already—and let me tell you: in this field, there’s always one programmer or jock or wannabe slacker who thinks he can just explain to you that this course should be a blow-off. It’s nothing personal; it’s not about you, and it’s definitely not about the Middle Ages. And that’s okay.” He laughs a little at her disgusted face. “It is! It’s okay. In a lecture hall, your job isn’t to teach the Middle Ages; it’s to teach students. All you can do is try and make him a little less scared of thinking.”

She looks startled, and a little skeptical. “Thanks,” she says. “I’ll remember that.”

“That’s the kind of deep wisdom that earned me that chili pepper on Rate Your Professor,” says James solemnly, which does get a real laugh out of her, cut off when his watch starts beeping. “Oh, _shit_,” he says, and, “Oh—sorry. I have to go—I have to be _gone_. Did you get your study guide? Yes? I’ll see you Thursday—enjoy de Troyes—goodbye—”

And without seeing her leave he’s racing out the door and down the stairs, nearly braining himself on a postdoc before he’s out of the Arts & Sciences building and across the rain-slick, leaf-spattered street to the Center for Medieval Studies. The elevator takes forever—the elevator always takes forever—and when it finally comes, James spends forty slow, creaking seconds riding up to the seventh floor, and another five waiting for the door to rattle reluctantly open, before he’s off like a shot through the lobby, down the hall, past his own office and Sam’s, past Dr. Fury's, to the thick wooden door at the end with CARTER COLLECTION READING AND VIEWING ROOM embossed in gold on its window.

He stops, smooths down his hair. Adjusts his shirt. Turns down the collar of his coat, which has come half-up in his rush—

“I know you’re there, Barnes,” says a weary voice from behind the door. “Come in and get your manuscript.”

James bursts through the door as professionally as he can manage and skids to the front desk, where Dr. Fury, the Center’s director, is leaning against the front desk with his arms crossed. “It’s here?” he says. “It came? You have it? Maria has it? Can I have it? Do you—did it arrive already? Does it need to be processed? Where's Maria? Can I look at it now?”

“It's here,” says Dr. Fury, and holds up a hand to James, “but you can't look at it. Don't give me that look—Maria needs a week to process before you get to put your hands all over it, and you're going to _give_ her a week, and you're not going to complain. You can look at the _first page_. The rest can wait.”

“I can look at the first page,” says James, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I’m okay with that.”

Dr. Fury gives him a deeply skeptical one-eyed glance. “Sure,” he says. “Have a seat. It's coming out of the back.”

The Carter Collection has archives you could get lost in for thirty years, but its reading room is about big enough to turn around in. It has one stout, slightly warped table, which is roughly as old as the university, and six rickety chairs clustered around it; James eases himself into one of the chairs, props his chin on his hands, and stares at the open door behind the front desk.

“For God’s sake,” says Dr. Fury. “You're waiting for Santa to come down the chimney. Are you going to be like this at the conference?”

“No,” says James petulantly, and then hears himself, and laughs. “I’m not gonna embarrass you at the conference, Nick. I’ll be fine. Promise.” He is absolutely certain he will embarrass Nick Fury at the conference. Dr. Fury is one of the most respected and rigorous medievalists in the world; it’s difficult not to embarrass him on a daily basis.

“I’m not worried about _me_,” says Dr. Fury, “it’s Falsworth you should be worried about. You know how many favors I had to call in to steal this from under the nose of the Bodleian—ah. Is it ready?”

“Ready as it’s ever going to be,” says Maria Hill, kicking open the swinging door by the front desk and sidling through it. She’s carrying, on a great aluminum baking tray, an enormous red-covered book.

James’ heart leaps into his throat.

“The cover page, and that’s _it_, Barnes,” she says, setting it down in front of him. “You’ll have plenty of time with it on your own to prepare for the conference. I want you out of here in an hour, and I'm going to be watching you the whole time. Is he listening? Nick, can he hear me?”

“The Shield manuscript,” James whispers, and reaches out to carefully open the plain leather cover. It’s been his preoccupation for eighteen years now, and his primary object of study for twelve. This is the first time he’s touched it in his life.

The Shield manuscript is a collection of poems, some in courtly Latin but most in plain Welsh, and almost all of them apparently autobiographical. There are only two extant copies, both originating from the same castle, created in the same time period, and both badly burnt. Both codices, too, are illuminated with the most spectacular and fantastical drawings: monsters, beasts, creeping and blossoming plants, tall and angular letters, people of all shapes and sizes, everything colored in deep vermilion and clear smalt and every other color of the rainbow. It’s so carefully drawn and lovely, and so consistent in style and detail across each manuscript, that scholars who otherwise spend all their time snapping at each others’ throats agree that the same person must have illuminated both. And—based on the time and place of the manuscripts’ creation—scholars agree that the artist must be the author of the poems, as well.

Two manuscripts; two copies; two codices, each badly burnt from the fire that raged through the castle during the reign of Henry VIII. Scholars have been able to piece together most of the poetry, but illumination after illumination has been either half-eaten or entirely devoured by flames.

Until now.

The codex that James lifts off the baking tray, and places on the cushioned bolsters with shaking hands, is the third copy of the Shield manuscript, discovered this past winter in an ice-covered monastery in the Northern Isles with absolutely no clue as to its provenance or its survival through the centuries. It’s spent the last six months in the care of Scottish restorers—and they've reported that, despite its distance from its sister manuscripts, it appears to have been illustrated by the same hand. And, while it’s visibly water-damaged and astoundingly fragile, it is the most well-preserved copy of the Shield-manuscript in the world.

Today—due to a great deal of luck, a great deal of blackmail, and what James is aware is a great deal of money, all of which Dr. Fury has engineered—his university is its sole owner.

And, in these brief weeks while scholars around the world wait for their approvals to go through, James is the only person in his field studying it.

To his surprise, he finds himself blinking back tears. He presses his knuckles to his eyes. “Nick,” he says. “I know you must have—this must have. I don’t deserve this. I don’t know how to—”

“Don’t,” says Dr. Fury, looking deeply embarrassed. “Listen. This isn't about you. I’ll owe Carol Danvers a hell of a favor. This is going to be an asset to the whole university. We needed someone to kick Oxbridge’s asses at the conference. You’re going to make us proud and if you cry on vellum I’ll have you fired.”

James coughs, takes a deep breath, and tilts his head up. “I’ll do my best,” he tells the ceiling. “I swear.”

“I know,” says Dr. Fury. “Wash your hands.”

“Yes,” says James. “Thanks. I will do my best and I will wash my hands.”

The first page of the Shield manuscript is consistent across all five codices: an escutcheon, estoile argent on an azure field, bordure gules. It’s this shield that gives the manuscript its name—and this shield that gives it its mystery: no books of heraldry contain it, no other records from the time period note it. And, most mysteriously of all, in his poems, the Shield-poet appears to identify it as his own coat of arms.

The Shield-poet isn’t a monk, or a court-sponsored bard. Some scholars, James among them, believe he wasn’t even an aristocrat. Instead, he’s either a knight or a common soldier—his poetry speaks from the point of view of both—and, simultaneously, a sort of troubadour. He writes hymns, battle lyrics, pastorals, even some love songs. Who he was, how he became literate, and why he was able to devote so much time, energy, and money to creating these highly expensive and artistically unmatchable manuscripts, is unclear even a thousand years later.

It’s a puzzle that has consumed James’ life since he was nineteen years old. From the moment he saw the Shield-manuscripts’ most famous illumination in his undergraduate Medieval Art 101 course—a many-headed dragon, towering over a landscape, and at its feet a tiny knight, brave-faced and stout, brandishing a sword—James has been in love. He’s spent his entire career trying to see the hand that drew that knight, small and unflinching before the monster. He would do anything to know what the mind behind that hand was thinking. He would do anything to talk to him.

The rain is falling thick and cold through the grey evening when he leaves the Carter Collection at last and starts towards his house, holding his coat over his head. The streets are thick with leaves, bright gold and mottled red, brown-bruised where a thousand hurrying students have trod them down; the streetlights blink on as he crosses by them, throwing long shadows over the sidewalk. After a minute the rain is dripping off his nose, and after a few more he’s soaked to the skin. When he reaches his house at last he jogs across the lawn, fumbling with the key, and punches the heat on as soon as he’s indoors.

The house seems darker tonight than usual. He changes into pajamas and flicks on the lights in the laundry room, the kitchen, the living room; he lays his coat and socks on the radiator to dry. Its rattling hum seems very loud against the quiet drumming above him.

His desktop takes a few minutes to boot up. There’s an email from Becca, which he saves for later, one from the nearby church about donations, which he deletes automatically—and, oh, God. His high school reunion is coming up.

James clicks delete. Then he hesitates, and goes into his trashbin to open the email. It’s a cheerful, blinking e-vite: so-and-so welcomes the Class of ‘99, venue and time, food and drinks, et cetera. Their former class president apparently hasn’t mastered the art of the BCC. James scrolls down the list of emailed invitees, trying to recall their faces. He can hardly remember one. He hasn’t thought of any of them in years.

He could go. There’s nothing stopping him. The train runs from this town to Penn Station, and he still has friends in Brooklyn who would put him up for a night; he could walk around the old neighborhood, see what’s open, what time has bought out and burnt and drowned. He could let his old high school classmates see him, could tell them about his life: oh, yes, he’s a professor. Yes, _that _university. Yes, he does have a book. Yes, tenure, too.

No, he doesn’t have children. No, he isn’t married. No, he isn’t dating anyone, either. Yes, he lives by the campus. Yes, he lives alone.

God, is he really thirty-eight? Are Jennifer Myers and Jennifer Wade and Michael Delaney and Ashley Delgado all really thirty-eight, too? Have all of them gotten careers, grown up, found true love or something near enough to it? Those boys that he used to race around the football field with, that he used to dance next to on Saturday nights, that he used to change beside in the locker rooms, have they all found wives, had children? Are they all inside their white picket fences? Have they all already gotten to the part of the story called _happily ever after?_

Is Jeff Vandergill married now?

It’s been years since James thought of him consciously. It’s been years since he tried to picture his face. He’d kept no photographs of him, afterwards, no photographs that showed the two of them together. He’d even left his yearbook in the trash, the day he’d packed for college. His mother had protested, tried to reason with him, tried to argue. _You think you don’t want them now, _she’d said, _but you’ll want them when you’re older. If you throw all these out you’ve hardly got any record of the last four years, Jamie. You’ll want to remember them, someday._

He hadn’t told her what Jeff had done to him. What he’d made Jeff do to him. He’d let her think they’d grown apart, the way high school friends do; he'd let her think what had separated the two of them was time.

Jeff probably is married. He probably has children. He probably hasn’t thought of James in years.

James hesitates another moment. Then he clicks back to his inbox, opens the email from Becca, and begins typing a reply. The invitation can stay in his trash bin. He’ll forget about it, if he stops looking at it for long enough; and he won’t think about ancient history any more.

-

“So,” says Sam, “tell me about your picture book.”

“Fuck off,” says James, “‘my picture book.’ You want to talk about picture books? How’s _Where The Wild Things Are?_”

“The Ashmole Bestiary is fine, thanks,” says Sam, and sips his coffee. They’re in his office, which is startlingly bare, empty of all the usual papers and books Sam has piled up on every available surface. He’s been working on a treatment of _De avibus _for the past three years, and James has grown used to the chaos of research; now that the book is drafted, printed, and with Dr. Fury, Sam’s desk seems very naked. “It’s in Oxford. I’m in New England. Neither of us were discovered frozen in a block of ice in the middle of nowhere nine months ago under highly mysterious circumstances, so _you_ are still on the hook. Tell me about your picture book.”

“You have a copy of _Gawain and the Green Knight _on your bedside table, asshole, I _know _you know where the Orkneys are,” says James. “My manuscript is fine, too. We’re all fine. Everyone is fine. That's what you wanted to hear?”

“Come on,” says Sam, and leans back in his seat, grinning. “I’ve met you, James Buchanan. You’ve had it for a week now, there must be _something _you’re excited about. Did the Shield-poet tell you his favorite color? Did you discover what kind of flowers and chocolates he likes?”

James takes a large gulp of hot tea to cover his discomfort. In all the time he's been at this university, Sam’s never hidden his sexuality. More than not-hidden; he’s open with James about it. He tells him about his dates, he tells them about his boyfriends. He makes jokes like this.

James wants to be comfortable with it. He wants to be tolerant. Accepting. He does. But no matter how he tries, whenever Sam says something like this, he feels abruptly as if he’s missed a step in the dark. Even now, his heart is hammering as if he’s just run a mile.

“I should never have told you my middle name,” he says, once he’s choked down the scalding tea. Sam winks at him; the blood in his ears rushes. “Anyway. No, uh. I’m working my way through the hymns now. The illuminations on one actually look pretty similar to the ones in Shield-2—not a perfect copy, but a really good one, it’s interesting. I want to talk to Stephen Strange about dating techniques, tracing, seeing what kind of mirrors were available in Wales at the time. Could get the Renaissance people interested, if there’s anything in it.”

Sam makes a face. “Renaissance people,” he says, “man. Better you than me.”

“Don’t be a dick, some of them are nice,” says James, without meaning it. “I don’t know. I’m only starting to look at it. I mean, we hardly know anything about the Shield-poet—at this point, I’m not gonna turn my nose up at anything.” He shakes his head. “Sam, I swear to God, it’s hard to believe anybody can be this lucky.”

Sam makes a thoughtful noise, and taps on the edge of his coffee cup. Then he says, “How long have I known you, James?”

“What?” says James. “I don’t know, ten years? Twelve?”

“Right,” says Sam. “And you trust me?”

James laughs aloud. “You’re only at my house every other week, I’ve only walked your dog about two hundred times. You’ve met my sister. You’ve met my _mother_. What do you think?”

“Okay,” says Sam. “So trust me when I tell you that you did not get lucky, James, you worked your _ass_ off. You did good work. You got praised by half the field. Fury _likes _you, and Fury likes about four people. This isn’t luck. This is you doing a good job.”

James stares at him for a long moment.

“Can I have you in my departmental review?” he says.

“If you ever quote any of that back to me I’ll deny it,” says Sam.

James shakes his head, smiling a little, and looks past Sam’s head, to where the rain is splashing in the gutters. “Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. I don’t know,” and sighs. “Do you ever feel—like this is all an accident? Like you blinked, and you’re some kid who tricked everybody into getting an office with his name on it? And any second now the administration will notice you’re here, and realize their mistake, and you’ll have to hand it all over and, I don’t know, go back to high school?”

“Oh, man, I’d love to go back to high school,” says Sam. “Love to see them try to pull some shit on me.” He flexes a bicep, exaggeratedly. “Who’s gay _now_, Brock Rumlow! Well. Still me.”

“I’m serious,” says James, his face hot. “I know it sounds like I need therapy.”

“We all need a lot more therapy than we're getting,” says Sam, grinning at him, “this is academia, man. Of course I have imposter syndrome. Us and all the other geniuses in the world, right?”

“It’s not just imposter syndrome,” says James, and, before he can stop himself, “I feel like—everything I touch, I ruin.”

Sam stares at him for a moment.

“What have you ruined?” he says. “You’ve never ruined anything as long as I’ve known you.”

James gulps at his tea again, wishing he hadn’t said anything. Sam knows almost everything about him, but James has never talked to him about—some things. He doesn’t mean to hide them. It’s not about Sam. It’s just that—if he talks about them, Sam will want to make a big deal of them; he'll want to think about them, talk about them, and James—has more than enough to think about.

“I have these—dreams,” he says, instead. “Have since I was small. And in the dream I’m high in the mountains, on the edge of this huge cliff, and it’s snowing, and there’s this guy with me, and I don’t recognize him, but it’s like I’ve known him my whole life. And I’m carrying a shield, and a sword, and I’m walking next to him, and he stops to say something to me—and the next thing I know I’m—”

He stops, aware of how silly he sounds. Across from him, Sam raises an eyebrow. “You’re what?” he says. “Falling?”

“No,” says James. “No, I’m—trying to kill him. I’m lying on top of him, and I have my hands around his throat, and I’m trying to strangle him. And he’s still trying to say something to me. He’s about to say my name.” He shakes his head. “And then I wake up.”

Sam sips thoughtfully at his coffee. Then he says, “You know, Tolkien had lifelong dreams he was in the fall of Atlantis.”

“What,” says James.

“His son, too,” says Sam. “Tolkien thought they were probably descended from Atlanteans. Some kind of cultural memory.”

James stares at him. Sam stares back. A wet leaf smacks into the window, gently, and flutters down to the courtyard below.

“God I fucking hate Anglo-Saxonists,” says James, with feeling, and buries his head in his arms. Above him, Sam is cackling, and after a few moments James feels his hand ruffle his hair.

“Cheer up, James Buchanan,” he says cheerfully. “You can put ‘spooky dreams’ in your next grant application. Fury is gonna love that kind of thing.”

The rain doesn’t let up all the next week, or the week after that. James finds himself continuously rotating his socks on and off the radiator; Sam laughs at him when he comes over for dinner, and arranges them in rainbow order when James isn’t looking. The students move from _le Chevalier de la Charrette _to _l__e Conte du Graal _to _le Chevalier au Lion_, and argue furiously about which knight is the best, and which knight is the most insufferable, and who ought to play them in a movie. The Shield-manuscript moves from pastorals to military poems, beautifully and incomprehensibly. James pages his way through, scribbling notes.

There’s a strange heaviness in the air. He can’t quite seem to get warm, and doesn’t know why. The rain is amazingly persistent, leaking through roofs and turning his lawn into a bog; one girl from San Diego asks him for an extension on her research paper because, she says, the weather is ruining her life. James laughs so hard he nearly gives it to her.

The week before midterms finds him in the Carter Collection again, as the students outside in the courtyard begin to spill into the caf for lunch. He’s cancelled class, ostensibly to give the students more time to work on their papers, but also for selfish reasons: he’s been saving this section of the manuscript for this week. The students are busy writing; he has no quizzes to prepare, and none to grade; he has no serious prep work at all. It’s time to turn to the love poems.

James knows half the love poems by heart. The Shield-poet writes about nature, as he does in the pastoral poems, but sprinkled into his verses are asides on his heart, his joy, his promised bride: _wind white trailing from the mountains, green the paved garden, silver-song in your arms._

In the first two Shield manuscripts, the illuminations of the love songs suffered the worst fire damage of all. Only a few half-images are left: the edge of a vine, the tail of a rabbit, the branch of a tree. James, who loves poetry but who only really dips into textual analysis when it reflects on art, has never had the opportunity to write about them academically before. It’s nearly new territory.

He hasn’t even looked at his favorite poem in the manuscript yet; he’s wanted to save it, like a birthday gift. It’s one of the only love songs where the Shield-poet isn’t joyful, where he even seems to show grief, and it begins, _My eye is a star in the mountains, my love is my eye in the white snow. My love is unseen in the mountains. Snow-wind, tell me the valley where my love has gone. Snow-rain, tell me where my love is falling..._

James is a scholar, not a man who relies on gut feelings. He hardly ever even _has _gut feelings. But he believes absolutely, without evidence or conscious understanding, that the Shield-poet will have illuminated _My eye is a star_, and that the illumination will be spectacular. He hasn’t wanted to tell Dr. Fury—he hasn’t even wanted to tell Sam—but he’s sure that the poem will be the subject of his paper for the conference.

The first love song, _Green the paved garden, _does have a full-page illumination—predictably, depicting a lot of plants—and James recognizes the edges of it: a vine, a branch, both of them in Shield-1. It’s more evidence that the poet copied illuminations from manuscript to manuscript, which is interesting enough, if not really what James is passionate about; he notes it down. The next, _The cuckoo in the chestnut tree, _is abundant in marginalia: the left side of the page is absolutely covered in birds, hopping and flying and sleeping in nests, shaded in fifteen different hues. James is taken aback for a moment, and he makes a mental note to tell Sam. It’s no bestiary, but the variety here is significant, and the artist’s talent is clearer than ever. Once Sam has had his crack at it, James might even want to study it himself.

The following poem, and the one after, and the one after that, are nearly bare of art; only the initial letters are illuminated, colored with the rich reds and blues characteristic of the Shield-poet. James turns past them. He’s not impatient—he doesn’t want to be impatient. He wants to take the time to appreciate all of this. But he's almost—

He stops dead.

_My eye is a star in the mountains_, reads one side of the page in Welsh. _My love is my eye in the white snow. _On the other side of the page is a full-page illumination of two figures, standing in a walled garden, hands clasped.

The technique is incredible. The colors are some of the richest and loveliest yet in the manuscript - the blue is a shade that must be made from lapis lazuli, the sun from real gold. The illumination is full of detail: on clothes, on the red roses blooming beside the figures, on their linked hands, on their faces. 

The figures are looking into each others’ eyes. One is in armor, and holding a sword in his free hand; the other, dressed in a blue robe, is holding a shield. Estoile argent, on an azure field.

It’s all James can do not to snap the book shut. He pushes back his chair, very carefully, and stands up. He takes a deep breath. He puts his hands back in his pockets.

“Maria,” he says, “can you put the book back in storage?”

Maria looks up from where she’s been typing away on her laptop, her eyebrows raised. “If you’re just taking a break, I’d rather leave it on the table,” she says. “I can keep an eye on it for you.”

“No,” says James. “No, I’m done for the day.”

-

“The poet has drawn himself in a romantic pose with a man,” says Dr. Fury. “That’s what you’re saying?”

The departmental meeting is silent. At Dr. Fury’s right hand, Natasha Romanov’s eyebrows are in her hair; Clint Barton has stopped chewing his pen. Sam, across the table from James, is biting his lip hard.

“It does look—potentially romantic,” James says, slowly. “The walled garden, the roses. The poet has never been—gendered, in describing their object of affection. No calling them _girl _or _maid, _no references to their breasts or genitalia. It’s been assumed that they were just—high-minded. Avoiding lewdness.”

“You say _they_,” says Dr. Fury. His eyebrows are raised.

“Well,” says James, and clears his throat. “We don’t really know anything about the Shield-poet.”

Sam’s face, across the table, goes very still. James presses on: “We don’t even know that he’s a _he_. It’s assumed, because when he speaks about his life, he talks about male society, and military activity—but it could just as easily be a woman writing, with the male narrator as a kind of fictional persona, one which allows her access to the military sphere. We know there were women working in the scriptorium at Lichfield. Or they could be platonic poems, written to a brother, or a liege lord. The roses mean love, but they also mean—martyrdom. Faith. The armored man could be a Christ figure.”

He takes a deep breath. “Or the illumination could be totally unrelated to _My eye is a star_. To any of the love songs. We’re making a lot of assumptions based on some roses, and a garden, and the fact that a drawing is next to a poem. It could mean nothing at all.”

“A lot of assumptions,” says Sam, “based on the language of symbols in every other manuscript from the period.”

James looks up at him, startled. Sam is staring flatly at him. “They are,” he says. “Yeah. They are.”

“You don’t think,” says Sam, “that it might be worth—considering. That the poems are autobiographical, and romantic. And about a man.”

“No,” says James, and looks down. His face is growing very warm. “No. It raises too many questions—about why his patron would pay for him to write and illuminate them, about how the text survived, about—I don’t want to project my—to force a certain reading onto a text that resists it. It’s anachronistic. It’s anachronistic and—and unprofessional.”

He’s breathing fast. He looks at his hands on the table, where they’re clenched into fists, and consciously makes himself unclench them. Across the table from him, Sam isn’t moving at all.

“All right,” says Dr. Fury, deliberately calm. “We’ll look forward to a progress update from you. I’ll talk to you about the conference paper next week.”

James nods, silent.

“Moving on,” says Dr. Fury, “Barton. Tell us how Bishop’s _Robyn Hode _is coming along.”

James looks for Sam, once the meeting is over; they usually grab dinner, afterwards, feed Sam's dog, gossip about the administration. But Sam is already gone, cleared out with the other faculty. When James jogs up to his office in the Center for Medieval Studies, it’s dark, with no sign of life. There's no answer to Sam's phone.

He walks home. The rain has slowed to a drizzle, but the air is freezing; it feels like they’re about to get sleet. James hunches into his coat. He’s starting to sympathize with the girl who said this was ruining her life.

The heater, which is controlled by a little digital display on the wall by his shoe rack, seems to be malfunctioning. He stabs at the up button, then stabs it again; the thing says it should be like a sauna, but it feels as cold it did outside. He tugs his boots off and goes to inspect the radiator. It’s rattling like anything, but he can only feel the heat when he holds his hands right next to the metal.

Cheap piece of crap. He’ll call the company in a bit; for now, he’ll see if the stove is working, put some soup on—

Behind him, the front door slams.

James turns, frowning. He’d been sure he’d closed that door.

Well—it’s growing warmer, anyway; he must have left it open, and forgotten. That’s not like him. He pads to the kitchen, fills a pot with water, and twists the gas knob.

No fire. He tries again, and again; the gas hisses, but the flame won’t catch. James sighs and pours the water out into the sink; he’ll microwave Campbell’s, again. He reaches for the can on the top shelf—

The front door slams again, hard. This time it sends the whole house rattling. The can topples off the shelf; James barely catches it before it hits the floor.

The stove bursts into flame.

James turns with his mouth open. He’s _sure _he turned the gas off, he’s _always _careful about the gas. And he’s certain the front door couldn’t have opened on its own; it always sticks.

He puts the can carefully down on the counter and texts Sam a gif of Keanu Reeves saying _Something strange is afoot at the Circle K. _Then_, the circle k is my house. u know anything about home appliances?_

A minute or so later: _u okay? didn’t see you after the meeting_

Sam is silent. That’s okay; he must be busy. He can’t be paying attention to James all the time. James fills the pot with water again and puts it on to boil, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his stomach. He’ll be fine. He’s just having a weird night, is all.

-

When he knocks on Sam’s office door the next afternoon, though, there’s no answer. The light is on, so James knocks again, and finally calls, “Hello?”

“I’m in here,” says Sam's voice, curt.

James opens the door. Sam is at his desk, which is covered with books again; in the center is a massive pile of paper, covered in red pen, on which Sam is scribbling diligently in green.

“Hey!” says James, delighted. “You got the draft back? How’d Nick like it?”

“He liked it fine,” says Sam.

“Okay,” says James, and when Sam says nothing, prods, “Just fine?”

“Just fine,” says Sam. His pen hasn’t stopped moving.

James shuffles forward into the office, a little, feeling uncharacteristically awkward. “Okay,” he says. “Well. Can you let me know if you have some time, later?”

“Why?” Sam says.

James shrugs. He feels very uncomfortable, standing here like a student who’s been sent to see the principal. He’s never felt uncomfortable in Sam’s office before. “I don't know, no reason. I want to talk to you about the conference, I guess.”

Sam says, shortly, “I don’t think you do.”

James blinks. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means what I said,” says Sam, and turns a page. “I don’t think you want to talk to me.”

“I don’t understand,” says James. He does understand. He doesn’t want to understand. He feels very cold, again. “You think I don’t want your opinion?”

“No,” says Sam, without looking up from his pile of paper. “I don't think you do. It’s anachronistic, apparently. And unprofessional.”

James feels his heart drop into his gut.

“I'm not going to write about _My eye is a star_,” he says, once he has his voice back.

“James,” says Sam, sounding very tired, “I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“I’m presenting another paper,” says James. “I’m talking about that tracing technique. I’m talking to Stephen Strange. I emailed Nick about it last night.”

“You couldn’t care less about a tracing technique,” Sam says. He’s stopped writing. “What you care about is the Shield-poet. That’s all you’ve ever cared about, as long as I’ve known you.”

James says, “I care about you.”

Sam looks up at last, and James has to look away from his gaze, dark and sharp and all too clear. “You think this is about me?” he says.

“I didn’t mean,” says James.

“No,” Sam says, “answer me. You think you’ve, what, insulted me? You thinks I’m angry at you because I disagree with your _academic opinion?”_

“Of course I—” says James, genuinely thrown. “Sam—_haven’t_ I insulted you? Isn’t this about—you don’t think the Shield-poet is—”

Sam is squeezing the pen so hard his knuckles have gone white. “He’s what, James?” he says. “What is the Shield-poet?”

James can’t say anything. Sam breathes out, hard, and sets down his pen.

“You won’t call the Shield-poet gay,” he says, and holds up a hand when James opens his mouth. “Okay. You won’t say he had same-sex desire. You won’t say he felt love for another man—that he was even capable of it. You won’t say these things, James, but it’s not because you think they’re not true. It’s because you can’t bring yourself to _ask the goddamn question.”_

“I can—” James starts.

“No,” says Sam, “you can’t. You’d rather sit in front of Nick Fury and say, well, maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe we just shouldn’t interpret this text. Maybe, since it _raises too many questions_, we shouldn’t try to answer them. Maybe this work just isn’t worth doing, and we can all pack up and go home.”

He’s breathing hard by the end. It takes him a moment to collect himself; then he picks up his pen, caps it, uncaps it again.

“I have to work,” he says.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” James says. His voice sounds very small. “I don’t know what you want me to write.”

Sam closes his eyes briefly. “I don’t _want _you to write anything,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you what to write. I’m not your goddamn advisor. I’m—” He shuts his mouth, abruptly, and presses his lips together.

“You’re my friend,” whispers James.

“I _want_ to be your friend, James,” says Sam. He sounds tired. “Is that what you want?"

James doesn't know what to say.

"I'm your colleague," says Sam. "And as your colleague, I’m telling you to do two things: firstly, get your shit together. And secondly, get out of my office.”

James’ house is empty and dark under the sheeting rain. He peels off his wet coat, his wet shirt, lays his socks on the radiator automatically. He goes to the kitchen to make dinner. Then he sits down on the kitchen floor, his back against the sink, and wraps his arms around his knees.

He wants to text Sam right now. He wants to talk to Sam about his _day_. He wants Sam to like him. He wants Sam to think he’s a good scholar, and a good man. He wants Sam to call him a friend.

Jeff Vandergill had been his friend.

It hadn’t stopped him, though.

But that had been James’ fault—just like this is James’ fault. That had been James’ fault, because he’d _known _the rules. He’d known what other boys did with their friends and what they didn’t do, when they touched each other and when they hit each other, when they talked each other up and when they called each other names. He’d known. He’d known better.

He’d known he was touching Jeff too often, too affectionately. He’d known he needed to stop telling him—_you’re the smartest guy on the football team. You’re the smartest guy I know. I like running plays with you. I like being around you. I like you._

He’d thought he could get away with it. Had gotten away with it, almost, for four years. It had just been bad luck; it had just been one drunk kid, the wrong party on the wrong Saturday night. Just one drunk kid who’d seen James’ hand on Jeff’s arm, and had come up to Jeff, later, and said—

And Jeff had taken James into the front yard, where everyone could see them, because he understood the rules; because he understood how things were done. And he’d said, _James, be honest with me. Are you a—_

James had stayed as still as he could. Then he’d walked home. He’d made his excuses to his mother in the morning, and he’d let her put the frozen peas on his eye, and the Neosporin on his leg and his arm. And he’d thrown the photographs of himself and Jeff away.

He’d learned his lesson. He'd thought he had learned his lesson. He'd thought he had stopped ruining things.

He tilts his head back until it thumps against the kitchen cabinets and listens to the clock tick above him. He’d thought—he’d really thought—that his friendship with Sam would last. That it would be lifelong. He’d thought that he’d known the rules, that he’d seen the boundary lines. He’d thought he’d gotten it right this time.

Outside the window, the wind is howling like it’s lost someone. He closes his eyes.

-

“Well,” says James, “let’s talk about the tomb. _Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus_—that’s pretty unambiguous: _here lies buried the renowned king, Arthur._” He pauses. “Or that’s what Gerald of Wales tells us. Of course, we can’t see the tomb ourselves—Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell saw to that. But before the dissolution of the monasteries, it certainly was a hell of a tourist attraction. Now, if we consider the eyewitness—yes! Eli?”

“Didn’t the reading say the abbey was burned down right before they discovered the tomb, though?” says the boy in the American flag hoodie bluntly, putting his hand down. “Isn’t that kind of suspicious? As soon as they need funds to rebuild, here’s this grave of the most famous king in England?”

“You’re skipping ahead in the lesson plan,” says James, smiling. Eli shrugs, unrepentant, and James hits _forward_ a few times on his PowerPoint and tucks his hands behind his back. Outside, he can see the rain lashing the windows, the trees in the courtyard twisting to and fro. It’s about an equal match for his feelings. He’d like to get through this lecture and get into the Carter Collection as quickly as possible; until then, propaganda is going to have to be a distraction.

“All right,” he says, “yes. The discovery of Arthur’s tomb was very financially convenient for the abbey. Maybe a little too convenient! But money wasn’t the only benefit provided by the discovery. Who can—”

The lights go out.

There’s silence for a long moment. Outside, the branches of the trees thrash, violent and soundless. The only noise is the high and endless howling of the wind.

“Jeez Louise,” says James.

In the front row, Gertrude audibly snorts. The spell breaks; the rest of the students burst into laughter and chattering, until James claps his hands. “All right! Hello—yes, I’m still here! I know it’s dark, but it’s still class time; you’ll just have to pay attention to my voice, for once. Don’t worry, I won’t quiz you about anything you can’t take notes on. I’m sure the lights will come back on in a minute. Until then, who can think of another benefit to the monastery, besides money?”

“Uh,” says a voice from the back.

“Yes!” says James. “Whoever that was. Come down to the front, if you’re in the back, I want to see you. We’re all friends here.”

“Well,” says the voice—James can see him as he comes into view, a little dark-haired kid with a bandana round his head, a friend of Eli’s—“did it really help the monastery? I mean, they got dissolved anyway. They got dissolved _because _they had money. It was more of a curse than a blessing in the end, wasn’t it?”

James rubs at his shoulders. He hadn’t thought the room was being heated, but it seems to be getting cold in here. “I mean, that’s a little outside our purview,” he says. “We’re focusing more on the artistic—yes?”

It’s a skinny Goth girl, who always sits next to Gertrude and hardly ever talks. “Yeah,” she says, “I was just wondering, _did _Arthur’s tomb have some kind of curse on it? Because—hey, shut up—” In the back, the skeptical freshman is audibly laughing. “I’m not saying it was—I was just wondering.” She pulls her coat tightly around herself. “Sor-_ry_.”

Instead of answering, James crosses to his desk to fetch his own coat. It really is unusually cold; he's almost worried his teeth will start chattering. “Unfortunately for the Halloween-minded among us,” he says, once he’s found it, “tomb curses are mostly found in Hollywood pyramids, not twelfth-century England.” He shrugs it over his shoulders, turns to face the students. “You’ll have to look elsewhere for the angry dead, I’m afraid.”

Something slams hard into the floor.

James is knocked nearly off his feet; only by clutching at his desk does he stay upright. The students aren’t so lucky; they’re knocked into each other like ninepins, their desks rattling on the hardwood. One student who’d been making her way from the top of the hall to the bottom falls flat on her ass, and yelps in pain.

“What was _that_?” says James, and is dismayed to hear a chorus of student voices echoing him. He shouts above them: “What was that? Who was it? Did anyone see?”

The hubbub continues. No one, apparently, saw. James claps his hands for order, then claps them louder. Finally he’s forced to whistle with two fingers in his mouth, which he hasn’t done since he last babysat Becca’s seven-year-old.

“Is everyone all right?” he calls. The room is glacial—he feels as if he’s in a refrigerator.

“I think I bruised my tailbone,” says the student who fell, still sitting on the floor.

“You didn’t bruise your tailbone, you just want to skip the Friday quiz,” hisses the girl beside her.

“All right,” says James, pointedly ignoring that. “Betty, go ahead and go to the student clinic—someone go with her.” A freshman in a Doctor Who T-shirt slings his bag over his shoulder and slings his arm over her shoulder; the two of them make their way up the stairs, slowly.

“Okay,” says James. “If no one else is injured, on the subject of—”

“Professor,” says the girl who’d called Betty a faker, “I don’t think the lights are coming back on. Can we cover this on Thursday?”

“Plus it’s _freezing_,” says Eli. There’s a low murmur of agreement from the students; James sees a few teeth chattering.

Still, he hesitates. He tries to make a point to put students’ needs first, but something in him is strangely reluctant to end the lesson here. It feels like—running away from a fight.

“One more thing,” he says. “Then I’ll let you go, all right? And we’ll be talking about this on the online forum, so don’t think you’re off the hook for participation.” He clears his throat, ignoring the miserable, pale faces of the students clustered near him. “Gerald of Wales says this of the tomb: _In their stupidity the British people maintain that he_—that’s King Arthur—_is still alive. Now that the truth is known... the fairy-tales have been snuffed out, and the true and indubitable facts are made known._”

He claps his hands. “So! We’ll talk about it on the forums. _The fairy-tales have been snuffed out. _Is he right? Is he wrong? What kind of man has a hate-on for fairy-tales? And why?”

They stare at him hopelessly. He waves his hands. “Class dismissed,” he says, and watches them shuffle past him and out of the classroom. The door finally shuts behind Gertrude, with a final-sounding _click_.

Immediately, the lights flick on above him, one by one. The heat rushes in like a long-lost friend.

“What the fuck,” says James, aloud.

The latch on one of the windows rattles, loudly. When he looks at it, it stops moving.

James lifts his book bag cautiously, and slings it over his shoulder. Nothing immediately seems to happen. When he shuts the door of the classroom behind him, though, one of the lights in the stairwell makes a terrible crunching sound and goes dark.

James hurries down the stairs, and across the street. It doesn’t help him shake off of the feeling that something is watching him go.

The Carter Collection is no better. The longer he stares at _Green is the paved garden_, the more it seems to taunt him. The edges of the trees, the curl of the vine that he knows so intimately from Shield-1, they don’t make him want to write; they make him want to curl up in a ball.

Without meaning to, he finds himself turning the pages of the manuscript, until it’s staring at him from the page: the walled garden, the roses, the man in the blue robe and his companion. The two of them staring into each other’s eyes, like chivalric love was invented yesterday, and for their sake alone.

The wind is quieting at long last, the rain slowing to a steady patter on the windows. _My eye is a star in the mountains_, says the Shield-poet. _My love is my eye in the white snow._

He can’t stop looking at the man in armor, the man next to the Shield-p—next to the figure in the blue robe. The man of war, at rest in a garden of peace. His hair is shaded in a dark brown; his eyes are bright, his mouth a flat line. The way he’s looking at his companion—

The way the Shield-poet is looking back at him—

James digs his fingers into his leg. When he’d first heard the news of the manuscript’s discovery—he’d felt like it was a miracle, like it was a gift for him personally. He’d thought it was the best day of his life.

He pages back, slowly and carefully, to _Green is the paved garden_, and puts his pencil to his notes. This isn’t a miracle. This is the job he has to do. Outside, the wind is beginning to howl again.

He leaves the Carter Collection a little before sunset, and turns down the hall. Dr. Fury’s office door is closed, but the light is on. When James knocks, there’s a barely audible sigh. “It’s open,” says Dr. Fury’s voice.

James pokes his head through the door. “Hi. Just making sure—”

“Your email,” says Dr. Fury. “Yes. Come on in.”

James settles in the guest chair. Behind Dr. Fury’s head, the windowsill is plastered with leaves, torn from trees by the storm. Dr. Fury is typing furiously, his eye narrowed. “Gimme one second,” he says, “I’m on the line with Carol Danvers.”

James sits very still while Dr. Fury types. He can see a cat video playing in the reflection on Dr. Fury's window, faint over the whirling rain behind it. Finally Dr. Fury hits _enter_, claps his laptop shut, and turns to James. “Okay,” he says. “On to less important things. Your conference paper’s settled?”

“Right,” says James. “You know I’m going to talk about the similarities between it and the Shield-1 copy, technologies they might have used.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” says Dr. Fury, his voice measured. “I think it is up Stephen Strange’s alley. He’s confirmed with you that he’s interested?”

“Yes,” James says, guiltily. He’s meant to talk to Stephen all day.

“So this is going to be a more technological project,” Dr. Fury says. “Scientific in scope. That’s a new area for you.”

“It is and it isn’t,” says James, folding his hands in his lap. “I want to rely on Stephen for any really imaginative reverse-engineering—that’s his area—but I want to stay in the historical, focus on the Shield-poet’s artistic influences, where he could’ve picked up these technologies from. I think it’s going to provide valuable insight into his process. We’re always trying to find out more about the logistics of the Shield-manuscript. It’s one of the central problem areas.”

“Central problem areas,” Dr. Fury repeats, and blinks inscrutably at James. “You sound enthusiastic.”

He knows he doesn’t. “I’m looking forward to the long-term implications of this,” he says. “I, uh. I think it’s going to be a big breakthrough.”

Dr. Fury taps his fingers on his desk. “James,” he says, “are you feeling all right?”

“What?” says James, surprised. “Yeah, I’m feeling fine. I think I’m feeling fine. Why?”

“You’re looking,” says Dr. Fury, jerks his head. He looks as if he wishes he hadn't asked. “Tired. I don’t know, pale. You cold?”

James is shivering, though he hadn’t noticed; he’s been a little cold for weeks, now. Consciously, he makes himself stop. “I’m fine,” he says. “Really.”

Dr. Fury’s face says he doesn’t believe a word, but he only frowns, and opens up his laptop. “All right,” he says. “Bring me an outline when you have one. I’m looking forward to hearing from Stephen Strange.”

James pauses, on his way back towards the lobby. There’s one more light on in the hallway.

He opens Sam’s door. “I’m doing the tracing project,” he says.

Sam is scribbling furiously, his book spread out like a deck of cards before him; when James’ shadow falls across the page, his hand stills. He clicks his pen closed. “I know,” he says. “You left Nick’s door open.”

James hesitates in the doorway.

“Sam,” he says, “I think I might be haunted.”

Sam’s jaw works; then he clicks his pen open, and begins writing again. “We’re all haunted, Barnes,” he says. “You’re just an asshole.”

It takes James a long time to go home. He lingers in his office, half-hoping for a an undergrad with an inane question; he goes to the student coffeeshop and sits there long past sunset, chewing a cold sandwich and watching the leaves float along the gutters. He waits for his phone to light up. He waits for someone to talk to him.

Going home, with his head hanging and his boots filling steadily with water, feels like a defeat. He unlocks the door, making a mental list of everything he has to get done before he can collapse on his bed: email Stephen Strange, set the dryer going, text Becca advice about her new boyfriend, tell his mother if he’s coming home for Thanksgiving. He pulls off his boots, punches the heater, closes the door behind him.

Without warning, the temperature in the room drops. One moment it’s an ordinary, if chilly, October night; the next, it’s as if the Arctic has come to his house all at once. Every hair on his body is standing on end.

His stomach sinks. Slowly, James turns to face the door.

Without any touch from his hand, it creaks gently open. Then it slams shut.

James backs up one step, then another; then a gust of wind hits his back, hard. He falls to the floor—rolls to get up—but as he’s moving, the whole shoe rack begins shaking, wobbling, and overturns itself with a _crash _onto the hardwood. Shoes go spilling everywhere, running shoes and Oxfords bouncing off the walls, the rainwater in his boots washing up and over his legs. James backs up, rapidly, until his back is against the coffee table in the living room, and scrabbles to his feet—and then the coffee table is moving, too, shuddering on the carpet, the knickknacks and heavy book on it sliding to and fro.

He turns and runs. In the kitchen, he can hear the radiator thumping. As soon as his foot crosses the doorway, though, it hisses and stops. Frost is creeping over the window above the sink, licking and curling in icy ferns; the window latch begins to rattle, and then to shake. James dives towards it, lifts his hand to hold it still, and is struck in the face by a gale from nowhere; he’s forced backwards, into the kitchen table, and clutches at it with numb hands.

“Who are you?” he calls. He can barely hear himself above the wind. “Why are you doing this?”

The stove flicks on, tall blue flames, and then cuts off—and then on again, and then off. It’s not just the kitchen window that’s rattling now, but the living room, his bedroom, the back door, every window in the house. Under his hands, the kitchen table is shaking, pushing him forward, into the wind.

He edges along the kitchen floor, barely able to move, towards the back door. As soon as he reaches for the handle, though, the doorknob crusts over with ice. When his skin touches it, it burns, and he has to snatch his hand away.

“Tell me your name!” he shouts, desperate. “Just tell me what you _want_!”

The wind shoves him hard. James goes flying into the sink; it gushes water, then freezes over and shatters, ice shards flying everywhere. Before the wind can take him off his feet, he sinks to the floor, puts his arms over his head. He can hear the cabinet doors slamming around him, open and shut, open and shut, like he’s in his own personal hurricane.

“Please,” he says, to his knees. “Please, I don’t know what I did to you, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t hurt me.”

Abruptly, the house goes silent.

He looks up. The windows have stopped rattling. The cabinet doors have stopped slamming. The stove is off, with no hiss of gas. On the back door, the frost on the knob is melting, dripping in a clear pool to the floor.

When he stands up, there’s no wind around him. The shoe rack, back by his front door, is upright, with no sign of damage to it or to the floor. He turns on the heater, and hears it thump to life.

“Hello?” he says, cautiously.

Out of the corner of his eye, the light in his bedroom flicks on.

It’s still and silent when he goes in, aside from the pages on his Norton’s Anthology ruffling a little. There’s a heaviness in the air, but not the usual weight he’s felt over the past few weeks. James doesn’t know what to call the feeling, except—guilty, maybe.

He sits on his bed, and feels, unmistakably, the weight of another body beside him. Then it disappears, as quickly as it came. The light goes out.

There’s a very small whistle of wind outside the window, now strong, now weak. It sounds almost like crying.

That night he dreams of the mountains.

The snow is on the ground, piling high around him; there’s a sword in his hand; and ahead of him is a man, a man with fair hair, holding a shield, estoile argent and bordure gules. And James feels as if his heart is in his throat; as if his heart is in his eyes; as if his heart is in this man, and there is no place James would not follow him. And he turns to James, and he smiles, and he says—

—and James is on top of him, his hands around his throat. The man’s face is bloody, his eye swollen, and James wants him dead. He wants to see his corpse on the ground. He wants to show this man’s body to his peers, to his lord, to show them he’s done what he was supposed to, he’s done what he has to do, he’s followed the rules. He’s doing what he has to. He doesn’t have a choice.

The man opens his mouth again, and James needs to stop him, James needs to kill him now. James needs to kill him now, because he’s about to say the thing James needs not to know. He’s about to tell James who he is. He’s about to tell James what they are to each other.

The Shield-poet says, _You’re my friend. Bucky, you’re my friend._

James wants to kill him. James needs to kill him. James kisses him on the mouth.

He wakes with his heart pounding.

The clock on his bedside table reads 3:25. The house is still. When he pushes back the curtain on his window, the glass is clear; the storm is ended. The sky is pulsing with stars.

He wraps his robe around himself, unlocks his front door, and walks out onto his front lawn. On his bare feet the grass is cool, wet from the rain. His breath is faint in the air. There’s no noise, not even crickets. Not even the roar of distant cars.

He says quietly, to the air and darkness, “Hello.”

There’s no response. The air feels a little frostier than before, but that might just be his imagination. James tucks his hands into his sleeves and looks up. He can see the Big Dipper from here, swinging over his neighbor’s roof, Polaris unmoving at its tip.

“From my point of view,” he says, “history seems generous, I think. There’s so much it gives us, so much it lets us see. But from another—history’s just time, isn’t it?” He scuffs his foot on the grass. “And time takes more than it gives. Memories, and chances. And friends. The things that survive, they don’t survive intact. Almost everything I touch is a little damaged. It has to be.”

The wind is picking up. He can feel it, ruffling at the back of his hair.

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me,” says James. And then, quietly: “I don’t think he—I don’t think I wanted to hurt you.”

The temperature has definitely dropped. The grass is stirring. At the end of the street, in the corner of his eye, a streetlight is beginning to flicker.

“I wish I knew you,” he says. “I do. I wish I knew why you cared about him. Me. About the—person you loved. I wish I even knew your name.” He hunches his shoulders. “You wrote so much. You must have wanted to be remembered so badly.”

The air around him is much, much colder now. The wind is growing wild; the treetops are waving, leaves fluttering away from branches. “Time took so much from you,” says James, over the sound. “Maybe it owed you something back.”

He closes his eyes. “You must have wanted Bucky to remember you more than anything.”

A frog croaks in the bushes. In the distance, a car alarm goes off, a steady, mournful wail. James waits as the air grows warmer, warmer, until nothing is left but the ordinary chill of the morning.

He breathes in, breathes out. Under his feet is the grass, and beneath the grass the stone. Beneath that, the old and undying planet, doing slowly and carefully the only thing it knows how to do; which is turn towards the future.

-

“So,” says Dr. Fury. “The conference paper.”

“The conference paper,” says James, and digs his nails into his leg to stop it bouncing. “Yeah.”

“I talked to Stephen Strange this morning,” says Dr. Fury. “He says you haven’t been to see him about any of your tracing-techniques ideas. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” James says. “Um. I’m sorry about that.” Dr. Fury stares at him; he adds, guiltily, “I think that is going to be a big breakthrough, for someone. I’m happy to let Stephen have a few months with the manuscript, if he wants to look at it.”

“No, you’re not,” says Dr. Fury. James smiles a little, without meaning to, and Dr. Fury raises his eyebrow. “Are you thinking about technology and techniques at all, then? Or do you have a new idea?”

“Not—new, so much,” says James. He glances behind his shoulder, to the open door of Dr. Fury's office. “I think. I think I want to talk about the love songs.”

“The love songs,” Dr. Fury echoes. He doesn’t look surprised. “All of them?”

“No,” says James. “Just, uh. _My eye is a star_.”

Dr. Fury says nothing. James twists his hands in his lap. “I think I have to,” he says, “because other people are going to, and it’s—either going to be me or Falsworth who gets the jump on it, I guess. The university has a chance to set the tone of the conversation.”

“The tone of the conversation,” says Dr. Fury. He looks away from James, adjusts a photo on his desk of a blonde woman hugging a little girl in a pilot costume. “You advanced a number of theories in the departmental meeting, I remember. Are you going to argue that the poet was a woman? Or that the poems were meant platonically?”

“No,” says James. “Neither of those.”

Dr. Fury’s hand stills on the photograph. “I see,” he says.

“I think,” says James, and swallows. “I think my research is going to have to consider that the Shield-poet was, based on the available evidence, a man writing love poems to another man.”

“That’s the angle you want to pursue,” says Dr. Fury. His face shows no expression. “You’re sure?”

“I,” says James. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

“You’d like to present that at the conference?” says Dr. Fury.

“Yes,” says James. “Yeah. I would.”

Dr. Fury nods, picks up a pen, and examines it. After some time, he says, without looking at James, “I told you that you would.”

“That I would—what?” says James.

Dr. Fury says, “Make us proud.”

-

He hesitates before he knocks on Sam’s door. In the end, the choice is taken away from him: the door opens, Sam clutching a pile of papers in one arm and his pen in his teeth, and stops dead when he sees James there.

“Sam,” says James.

“J’hhy,” says Sam, flatly, through the pen.

“Oh, for—” James says, and reaches up to take the pen from Sam’s mouth, and stops with his hand raised, and finds himself touching, very lightly, the skin just beside the curve of Sam’s lip.

Sam goes very still, like a deer. His eyes are wide. James hesitates for a moment more, his hand lingering—and then takes the pen, gently, and lets his hand drift back to his side.

“I’ve spent a long time,” he says, “scared of thinking,” and then he stops, and shakes his head.

“Sam,” he says. “I was wondering if, uh. If you and I could go out for dinner sometime.”

Something very strange and soft happens to Sam’s face. James watches him, the movement of his mouth, the darkness of his long eyelashes on his cheek, and swallows. “Well?”

“Only you, James Buchanan,” says Sam, and drops his manuscript on the carpet of the hallway, and takes James’ face in his hands.

James had thought kissing him would be a revelation. Like learning a new language; like discovering a different world. But instead—

It’s like the storm’s ended, and the rain in its rivers is running on home towards the sea. It’s like seeing every manuscript in the world made fresh, with their colors strong and bright, as if the fire had never touched them in the first place. It’s like remembering something he’s spent his whole life forgetting. Like a memory come out of the grave again, safe and saved from time.

**Author's Note:**

> Citations! 
> 
> The arch they're talking about at the beginning is the Duomo di Modena's [Porta della Pescheria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modena_Cathedral#Porta_della_Pescheria), which I personally have been obsessed with for years. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote [Historia Regum Britanniae](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/HistoriaRegumBritanniae%22), or History of the Kings of Britain, which is one of the earliest developed King Arthur narratives. [Le Chevalier de la Charrette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot,_the_Knight_of_the_Cart%22), [le Conte du Graal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceval,_the_Story_of_the_Grail%22), and [le Chevalier au Lion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvain,_the_Knight_of_the_Lion%22) are all romances by Chrétien de Troyes (about Lancelot, Percival, and Yvain respectively). King Arthur's tomb was implausibly discovered at [Glastonbury Abbey](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/king-arthurs-tomb) in 1191, probably at least in part in order to boost the power of the current ruling family (Plantagenets) by discounting the idea that Arthur would one day return to rule Britain.
> 
> The thing about Tolkien's dreams is true, and also the term "Anglo-Saxonist" is terrible. [De avibus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_of_Fouilloy) is a moral treatise on birds, which appears in a lot of medieval bestiaries. Gawain is not from the Orkneys in _Gawain and the Green Knight_, but he is in _Le Morte d'Arthur_ and in later stories. [A Gest of Robyn Hode](https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/gest-of-robyn-hode-introduction) is one of the oldest surviving Robin Hood ballads and very great and I wish Kate's dissertation could have been the whole story.
> 
> Geoffrey Vandergill is from the Golden Age - he's one of the Sentinels of Liberty, and is in fact a Young Ally. I have unfairly defamed him here because the Young Allies are hilarious and because in canon he later joins the CIA and fights in "Indochina", so the defaming probably isn't that unfair anyway.
> 
> The Shield manuscript is obviously very made up, but is based vaguely on the poetry of [Llywarch Hen](http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/h09.html) and [Dafydd ap Gwilym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seagull_\(poem\)). (I wanted it to be Irish but it just didn't work.) The titular Shield looks exactly like you think it does. In order to fit the demands of fiction, it dates from about 950 CE and also from about 1350 CE, and also my Welsh is very scanty and I have never formally studied the poetry. Academia as a workplace has also been highly fudged for the sake of the story.
> 
> I worked so hard to not refer to early modernist Stephen Strange as "Doctor" even one time.


End file.
